If you haven’t looked for a job in awhile, you may not realize how much your online presence can affect your job search. Studies show that employers are paying increased attention to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace, and other web sites when checking out potential employees. The things you’ve posted on those sites could very well come back to haunt you if you are not careful.

The use of social networking sites is growing quickly. Pew Internet and American Life Project reported in December 2008 that between 2005 and 2008, adult internet users who have online profiles quadrupled and was expected to continue to grow. Businesses caught on to this phenomenon and quickly realized that they could find out a lot of interesting information about their job candidates by doing a few quick internet searches.

In December 2009, Microsoft commissioned an online reputation study that found that 79% of hiring managers and job recruiters in the United States looked up job applicants on the internet. And 70% of those hiring managers and job recruiters actually rejected candidates based solely on what they found online, even when their experiences and references were stellar. CareerBuilder’s August 2009 survey had similar results. They also noted that 11% of the companies that were not currently using social networking sites to screen applicants, were planning on doing so in the future.

The lesson here is that your online life is never completely private. And future employers, even current employers, may be secretly watching the things you say, the pictures you post, and the people you associate with online. It doesn’t matter how perfect an employee you are if your online presence is controversial. With this tough job market, if your competition has a clean online identity while yours is not, they will have the winning edge. Watch what you say and do online and increase your odds of a successful job search.

A groundbreaking new book to boost your career was just released that I’d like to tell you about. It’s called The Twitter Job Search Guide. LinkedIn isn’t the only online social media site that today’s job seekers need in their job search toolkit.

Twitter is the new face of virtual business networking and is becoming an essential career management tool. In fact, some recruiters predict Twitter will replace job boards as a primary source for finding quality candidates.

For anyone in the market for a new job, considering a change of industry or job function, or wanting to increase their visibility, can be a useful resource. (It’s so informative and helpful that syndicated careers columnist Joyce Lain Kennedy stated in a recent article: “this is a book I’d wish I’d written – the how-to chapters are that good!”)

Tips from a handful of selected career professionals worldwide (my tips are among those featured) will help you learn how to gain momentum in your job search and career through “tweets” that consist of no more than 140 characters. It will show you how to exponentially increase the size of your personal and professional networks by exchanging ideas, demonstrating subject-matter expertise, enhancing their reputation, and developing a “fan club.”

A step-by-step guide, this book addresses how to build your professional brand, boost your online identity, find job leads, discover unadvertised positions, research companies, uncover industry trends, prepare for interviews, and raise your value as an expert in your field.

As you prepare your taxes this season, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants has some helpful reminders on what you can and can’t deduct on your tax returns.

Certain job-search expenses are deductible; to be considered tax deductible, the job being pursued must be in the same field as your current or most recent occupation. However manicures, haircuts, clothing, and a new suit are not. Your interview duds are considered a personal expense and hence aren’t deductible. The same applies for other personal-care expenses, such as haircuts and manicures, according to tax experts.

Moving expenses are in fact deductible, but the new job has to be at least 50 miles farther from your current home than your old job was. For example, if your old job was 10 miles away from where you live, your new job has to be at least 60 miles away. In other words, your commute has to increase by at least 50 miles.

In addition, the moving-expenses deduction generally only pertains if you’re moving to work full time. Quite a few types of moving expenses qualify, including paying someone to pack and move your belongings. Some don’t. For example, once you move, if you fly back to visit your old house, you can’t deduct your travel.

Nor can you deduct part of the purchase price of a new home or the loss you might take on selling your old home. Tax rules also exclude taking a deduction if you lost money on anything having to do with your old home, whether you lost a security deposit on a rental, you broke your lease or you lost money discontinuing membership in a country club.

In the modern world, the Internet has become a valuable way to do research, find jobs, communicate, socialize, and more. The upside to this technological innovation is the ease at which you can both submit and obtain information about a number of things, including yourself. One of the downsides, however, is that it can be nearly impossible to control what others put out there about you. And if you have not been careful, your own personal information that you put on the internet can be used against you in your career and job search.

If you’ve never done so or haven’t done so recently, you should search for your name in Google. For more accurate results, place your name inside quotation marks, i.e. “Louise Garver”. This will force Google to only return results that list your full name. Once you’ve performed the search, take a close look at the first few pages of results. Is anything there about you? There may be other people with your name, so keep that in mind. For the pages that are about you, what is conveyed? Is there anything showing up that you wouldn’t want a potential employer to see? Think very carefully about this. If there is anything that may be construed negatively, such as photos of you with a beer in your hand, controversial political opinions, or narratives about how much you hate your boss, you may want to seriously consider removing them. A potential employer may not appreciate your fun loving nature or understand your sarcastic views. They may also have divergent political opinions or be offended by your stance on the issues. You may think you don’t want to work with someone who is like that, but in this economy can you afford to be that picky? These types of things may color someone’s opinion of you without them even realizing that it is happening. It’s best to be safe and keep your internet presence as neutral and benign as possible.

What if someone else has put something on the internet about you that is less than flattering? Or, what if you posted something on a third party web site a few years ago that you are embarrassed about now, but cannot remove? This is trickier. The first thing to do is contact the owner of the site where the information is posted and ask them to remove it for you. Be polite and explain why you need it removed. If they refuse to comply, your best course of action is to start submitting positive information about yourself to various sites on the internet to try and stack the deck in your favor. In other words, Google likes new content, so anything new about yourself you can add to the internet in the form of social networking profiles, blog posts, forum discussions, web sites, etc., will likely be indexed above older material. So if you can push the older sites off the first page, the chances that a potential employer will see it go down significantly. Employers may search Google for you, but they are most likely going to focus on the first page or two of results and not spend hours searching through dozens of pages. If you can push the negative information down into one of the other pages and add plenty of positive and neutral entries about yourself, you’ll have less to worry about.

One thing to remember is that you cannot control how or when Google will index your information. It could happen overnight or it could take weeks or even months. And when they do index everything, there is still no guarantee that your newly posted data will rank higher than the data you are trying to conceal. This process may not have the effect you want, but it often does help so it can’t hurt to at least try.

The bottom line is that more and more employers are taking the time to Google potential employees and it does affect their decision-making. Be proactive and monitor Google on a regular basis to see what’s being posted about you. And when you are active on the internet, be careful about what you post that has your full name attached to it. Your friends may appreciate your humor or your views, but if it costs you a job, is it worth it?

When conducting a job search, especially one that is taking longer than you expected, it is essential to keep detailed records of your efforts so that you do not duplicate them, or worse, forget who you’ve applied with. The Guerrilla Recruiter recently blogged about this phenomenon (http://www.gm4jh.com/keep-detailed-records/) and gave several great tips for managing your job search records. His advice is to write down information on every job you apply to and that information should include the job title, company name, name of contact person, source of job lead, date applied, date of intended follow-up, and any other notes that might assist you in remembering the job.He also says to try and keep a copy of the actual job posting too.

Expanding on his post, I want to recommend a few techniques for keeping your job search efforts recorded easily. This task can be done either electronically or with actual pieces of paper. If you choose to work electronically, a spreadsheet is a great way to manage your efforts. Make each column represent one of the pieces of information above (i.e. job title, company name, name of contact person, etc.). If you don’t like spreadsheets, a Word document can work too. But spreadsheets are great since they allow you to sort information. If you want to sort by date applied or put everything in alphabetical order or something similar, you can easily do it with one click of the mouse.

If you choose to keep paper records, find a place in your home or office for this purpose and stick to it. Don’t have related pieces of paper in the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the den, etc. Invest in some file folders and a good stapler or paper clips. You could have a file folder representing each job or you could combine and have a separate folder for a particular date range (week or month), or even job type. Organize by the method that makes most sense to you. Staple or paper clip all of the information about a job together so that you don’t have to search later and so that nothing falls out of a folder by mistake. This information might include a copy of the resume and cover letter that you personalized for this job application, a copy of the job description, and a record of all of the information listed above.

Find the method that works best for you and stick with it. You may think this is unnecessary if you assume you’ll only be applying to 4 or 5 jobs. But in this job market, people are often applying to dozens if not hundreds of positions before finding something. When a potential job hiring manager calls, you don’t want to be caught off guard, unable to recall the company or job. It makes you look bad and could eliminate you from consideration right off the bat. Having the information in paper or electronic form that you can quickly retrieve will make you look good and improve your chances of gaining employment.

I’m sure most people have heard of Twitter by now. The social networking site that specializes in short blog posts of 140 characters or less has become all the rage. The beauty of this fairly new phenomenon is that its capabilities are continuously being expanded upon and people are finding all kinds of uses for it, never before imagined.

One area that seems to be taking off is with job searching. The standard Twitter search engine can be used to do keyword searches for anything, including job ads. Type in a job title keyword such as “account manager” and you’ll find posts about job openings for Account Managers. Unfortunately you also find a lot of non-related things. But the ability to search for job-specific Tweets on Twitter has recently become more sophisticated, which is fantastic news for job seekers.

TwitterJobSearch.com is a newly developed search engine that uses the power of Twitter to search job ads matching your keywords. The developers at Workdigital Ltd. have created a search engine that scans Tweets constantly, conceptualizes them, organizes them, and determines which ones are actual job ads, then presents those to searchers, filtering out the miscellaneous and non-related posts. With thousands of jobs being entered into Twitter on a daily basis, this is a highly useful service. And best of all, it is free. You can even limit your searches by geography by simply typing in a city or state.

With close to 6 million users per month and growing, Twitter should not be overlooked as a powerful tool for your job search. Adding TwitterJobSearch.com to your regular job hunting tactics could prove to be highly beneficial.

Many people are feeling fear, anxiety and immobility in the volatile economy we are facing today. As a career coach, I am seeing this fear translate into negative expectations and powerlessness as the unemployment statistics soar.

This week I attended a teleclass by Dr. Lynn Joseph on using a visualization technique that can help job seekers release fear and harness their own power and value to obtain what they are seeking. In studies conducted by Dr. Joseph, the majority of job seekers who used this technique became reemployed more quickly than those who did not. 

For anyone who is feeling stuck or hopeless in their job search — or is just getting started and wants to keep negativity at bay — Dr. Joseph's book, The Job-Loss Recovery Guide: A Proven Program for Getting Back to Work – Fast! and it's companion guided visualization recording, The Job-Loss Recovery Program, can help.

Posted by Louise Garver

It’s easy to get so excited about the new job you just landed that you don’t think very much about how you are closing the door to your present one.

However, how you depart leaves a lasting impression on your manager and colleagues, which can have an equally lasting impact on your career. My advice: end it on a positive note and make it easier for everyone by following the four tips below:

Tell your manager and colleagues first. Tell your boss that this is an opportunity for moving ahead in your career and that you have enjoyed your tenure with your company.

Prepare a formal resignation letter that includes the effective date, a brief explanation (such as pursuing career advancement) and a positive statement about your career with the organization.

Choose your departure date based on the number of weeks that will be appropriate for your level. For example, a month or more can be appropriate if it’s a senior-level position or one with critical projects in progress.

Take care of everything you need to do to provide proper closure regarding your responsibilities and any paperwork with the human resources department. Leave your contact information so that anything can be forwarded to you.

Keep in mind that negative comments can haunt you in the future. You never know where your former boss may end up working next.

Posted by Louise Garver

The Internet has dramatically changed how job searches are conducted. With the click of a mouse, you can distribute your resume to thousands of employers and search firms.

As a result, recruiters are inundated with resumes from unqualified job seekers. I recently spoke with one of my recruiter contacts who lamented about this problem—being deluged with resumes from unqualified candidates.

Recruiters, she said, are quick to spot mass mailings of untailored resumes and generic cover letters conducted without any research to identify appropriate firms that specialize in the job seekers’ field. If you send your resume indiscriminately, you lose credibility with those recruiters and employers.

The best way to gain credibility with recruiters and employers is to conduct highly targeted searches and apply only to positions for which you are qualified. If you are reviewing ads, scrutinize the list of stated qualifications that are required. A good technique to determine if you are a match is to print out the ad and underline or yellow highlight all statements that match your qualifications, skills, education and experience. If you don’t meet all of the stated requirements, which are considered minimum requirements, you’re not likely to get an interview.

Also, when conducting a targeted campaign to search firms make sure to include your job target, industry target, willingness to relocate and locations, percentage of time you are willing to travel, a broad compensation range, and your availability.

Ads for positions that are not a match or vaguely appeal to you won’t get you closer to your ultimate goal of winning the offer you deserve and want. Save your time—and respect the recruiters’ time—by concentrating on the ads for which you do meet the listed requirements and other search strategies that are more productive.

Posted by Louise Garver